SEO basics for Q&A tool

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi everyone,

our company wants to launch a Q&A forum on our website. The goal is to keep the useres interacting with our website, generate leads (of course) and... last but not least... to generate UGC for our website (and Google of course)...

[We organise career events with big companys for students, professionals, give career advice etc..]

From a SEO perspective, I find the following points difficult to overcome:

• the possible problem of "thin" content, many URL's with a question and only 1 or 2 answers will not look good for Google, especially when there are a lot of it (Panda-Update). One solution could be to noindex pages with thin content, but imagine that you have an active community, this could take ages and we got other things to do...

• the problem of finding ALL content: what would be the best solution to make sure that G finds all UGC, even the older content? Would it be enough to link to older questions on the page of the actual question? Let's say, this page contains links to the 5 questions before and so on... Or should there be categories of questions, where you list all of the questions ever asked???

• would you/can one optimise the content? Users do not ask questions with the beloved keywords and if there would be a standard solution that the URL and the Title-Tag contains the question, there could be a lot of strange/not useful pages on our domain...

I hope I could make clear what my problems are and I hope someone can give me some good advice...

Thanx!!

[accessKellyOCG]

Hi Russ,

thanks for yiur help, made things clearer to me!

One last question concerning the linking of the content: if we noindex all pages with less than x words, we can still put the links on dofollow, or doesn't it make sense?

Because if we create an overview page with the latest questions on it, it should be good for G and our users. So if we link to all latest threads (index and noindex), the users and G will find all the relevant content, G can follow the links on the noindexed pages and finds other content and so on...

Or doesn't it make sense to you? I am just worried that we will have many pages with small content and the Q&A will look empty to both G and our users...

[HiveDigitalInc]

Automation Automation Automation

1. Noindexing Thin Content: Perfectly fine strategy, but it should be easy to automate. Just have a combined word count of the question and the answers provided. If that word count is greater than X, then remove the noindex tag

2. Finding All Content: Good interlinking is all you need. First, you should have a page that lists all the latest threads that DO NOT have noindex tags on them. Second, you should interlink them well. If you have programmers, they might want to look into Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Term Extraction API. If you feed your QA content through this, it will find relevant words. With this, you can then create tags, and then you can show "related questions" based on those tags. This additional interlinking will help a lot.

3. Optimizing the Content: No. Users write questions the way they search for questions in Google. I would let the users control the content, and you just edit it for appropriateness.

[SEODinosaur]

Here is one way we did it on one of the sites I work on: http://mbmisteelbuildings.com/faq

You write all the Q&A on one page and you use anchors on each Q within the page to link to each A.